AHS Views

Many parents face the dilemma of trying to bring up their kids so they don’t drink alcohol. Or, at least, don’t abuse it. If someone does have an alcohol problem, they can get alcohol addiction help through an alcohol rehab program. But prevention is far easier than the cure: Once a person gets to the point of getting treatment, they have often done a lot of damage to their body, their family, and themselves. And sometimes it’s irreversible.

Educating kids on the dangers of alcohol is a common prevention method, but here are a few relatively new statistics that could be pretty convincing.

• One out of every five alcoholics who attempt to stop drinking without medical intervention end up dying as a result of alcohol withdrawal delirium. So, in fact, it’s not just will power or the mental and emotional dependence on alcohol that keeps people from quitting. The symptoms they experience are so severe they feel they just have to have another drink or they’re going to die. And, in one out of every five cases, they’re right. That really gives you a clue as to how bad drinking can be.
• 68% of people who go to hospital emergency rooms have an alcohol or drug problem. Just to give you more of an idea of how many people that represents – there are nearly 124 million ER visits every year, so that means over 84 million people with drug or alcohol problems are in ERs. I’ve heard a lot of people complain about not wanting to go to a hospital emergency room because they don’t want to wait for hours in a room with a bunch of ‘drunks’ or ‘druggies.’ Does your son or daughter want to be one of them?
• They should also know that most of these people in ERs aren’t hardcore, long-term alcoholics. The millions of accidents and injuries that occur while drinking often happen to people who are not really alcoholics at all.
• 20% of suicide victims in the US are alcoholics. You might be tempted to say that’s logical because if they weren’t really depressed or otherwise kind of messed up, they wouldn’t be alcoholics in the first place. Well, to a degree, that’s true. But people often start drinking for much more mundane reasons than wanting to kill themselves. They start because their friends think it’s cool, or because everyone around them drinks and they want to feel like they’re part of the crowd. And, by the way, this isn’t always because of ‘peer pressure’ – sometimes it’s just a matter of having people to talk to and hang out with. If all the people around you who you might want to hang out with are drinkers, it’s hard to talk to them unless you’re drinking too. Even just being a ‘little high’, not drunk, can be a vastly different world than being ‘sober.’
• Whatever the reason the person started drinking, alcohol can make you depressed – the longer you drink, the worse it gets. Also, the chances of alcohol causing problems in your life are very high – someone’s orderly life can turn into a mess once they start drinking. They lose family, jobs, friends, money, relationships, etc.
• At this point, you can be sure that they have wanted to quit for along time – they’ve seen the slide in their life. But, because alcohol is so addictive both mentally and physically, they have not been able to quit. So they slide down even further – their self-esteem is destroyed as they see their lives go down the drain and can’t do anything about it. Is it really surprising that under those circumstances someone would kill themselves?

Let your kids know about these things. Get them to really look at how bad it can get. That should help them realize that drinking has consequences that they really don’t want.

And in case they think they’re immune to all that, point out to them that there’s not much chance that anyone thought they’d become one of those statistics when they started drinking. No matter how they feel now, or who they think they are and  how they would react or respond to things, alcohol will change them.

Officials in Tennessee are predicting a surge in heroin addiction. Why? Is there a bumper crop of poppies in Afghanistan? Have the Mexican drug cartels pumped up their marketing efforts or lowered their heroin prices? No. It’s because there are so many people suffering from OxyContin addiction and addiction to other painkillers and prescription drugs, and those drugs are SO expensive, that the addicts are switching to heroin.

Why aren’t they just getting addiction help to overcome their problem? Well, that’s the nature of addiction; people don’t just walk into a drug addiction treatment center because they can no longer afford to support their addiction. They find ways to get the money – usually illegal and dangerous – or they find cheaper drugs.

Are we talking about druggies shooting up in alleys? No. We’re talking about the middle class – white collar workers and high school and college students coming from nice homes.

They tend to snort or smoke heroin instead of injecting it – that makes it more socially acceptable AND they have the false idea that if you don’t inject it, it’s less addictive – and dealers will even deliver to their homes, offices and dorm rooms.

It’s a regular gourmet take-out and delivery.

And instead of paying $30 to $80 per pill for OxyContin, hydrocodone or other prescription drugs, they only pay $10.

Prescription drug addiction is more common than you might think. It’s epidemic all over the U.S., and there’s a good chance that someone you are close to has a prescription drug addiction or abuse problem – your kids, some of their friends, your nieces or nephews, even your spouse.

If you need addiction help for prescription drugs – for yourself or anyone else – contact Addiction Help Services. Don’t let your family and friends turn into heroin addicts. Now is the time to help them change their lives.

Many parents think that if they let their kids drink at home, instead of going to bars or parties where they’re unsupervised and going to have to drive home, they’re going to be safe. That is not the case. In fact, it could foster substance abuse. What are your options? Alcohol rehab should be at the top of the list.

Case in point, a news story this week about a girl named Terry. She was at a party at a friend’s house. The parents were home. They had a few drinks with the kids, but then went to bed. They told the kids not to drink anymore.

Instead, Terry decided she would try to down 15 shots. This serious binge drinking poisoned her. She struggled all night lying on the bathroom floor, with her friends trying to help.

No one woke up the parents – the kids didn’t realize how dangerous the situation was. But as the news story put it, Terry wasn’t just struggling, she was dying. By the time the parents were informed, it was too late to save her life.

This incident happened in Michigan, in a county of less than 200,000 people. That county has a remarkably bad record with drugs and alcohol: Emergency medical technicians responded to about 175 overdose incidents and there 208 alcohol-related car crashes and 37 drug-related car crashes in 2009.

But, really, it doesn’t matter where this particular incident happened – it happens all over the U.S.

What went wrong? First, some parents have the idea that drinking with their kids is cool; it’s a way to ‘relate.’ But it sets the worst example. Will kids look up to their parents because they drink? Not likely.

Second, drinking at home, apparently safe, may keep the kids from having to get into a car and drive, but it doesn’t stop them from drinking too much, overdosing on alcohol, or becoming alcoholics.

If you have kids who drink, get them alcohol help. In a good drug and alcohol rehab program, they’ll come to understand that urge and overcome it. They’ll also learn to deal with it when friends around them are drinking. Then you don’t have to worry about them. Whether they’re home or out. They’ve become responsible.

If you’re worried about making sure your kids don’t turn into alcoholics, the best thing to do is start taking precautions against that when they’re very young. If you don’t do that, they could wind up in need of addiction help quite soon, and if they don’t get it, they could be fighting alcoholism all their lives. So, what do you do when you’re starting early?

First, educate them. Not lecture, just kindly give them the information they need. This means you’re going to have to get educated yourself. What is alcohol? How is it made? What is the real effect it creates on the body? Why it is poisonous? Show them drunk driving and domestic violence statistics. Binge drinking. And so on. They need to know what it is, what is does.

Second, set a good example. Don’t drink yourself or limit your drinking to once a week or so and then only have a small glass of wine or something like that. But, truthfully, even drinking in moderation sends the wrong message. The message is that no one needs alcohol. Period.

Third, keep them busy with activity that will give them a sense of purpose, accomplishment and satisfaction. The activity(ies) should be chosen by them, something they’re interested in, not something you’re interested in. It doesn’t matter if it’s track and field, ballet, making jewelry or astronomy. Encourage their personal interests and help them learn about them.

There are no guarantees, but if you want your kids to have the best chance of staying drug and alcohol free and avoiding drug or alcohol rehab in the future, this will give you a good start.

Wow, something really hit me in the news this week. Here at Addiction Help Services, we help people find the right addiction help for their situation. And we know that a really good drug rehab program actually stops addiction – i.e., the graduate is no longer an addict. The news item that hit me this week was about drugs and alcohol in baseball – it is pushing the idea that once an addict, always an addict, it never really ends.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Ultimately, no person can help another person get sober, and remain sober, unless the person with the issue recognizes their problem and is willing to address it. The reason Josh Hamilton is sober and playing at the highest level of the big leagues now is because of the support he had around him, and still has around him. He recognized he had an addiction, got the proper treatment to turn his life around, and even today, needs to surround himself with the right people looking out for his best interests. Addiction does not disappear once rehab is over, nor does it ever go away, so it is imperative that the MLB develops a policy and opportunity to help players recovering from addiction, from when the problem becomes known, until the player retires and beyond.”

Well, first of all, re “even today, needs to surround himself with the right people looking out for his best interests’ – is that because he used to be an addict? No, that’s how life should be! Our lives should always be full of people looking out for our best interests. True, surrounding yourself with individuals who are out to get you does lead to drug addiction and alcohol abuse – but not only if you’re a former alcoholic or addict. Being in an environment like that gets to everyone.

They also say addiction never goes away – so baseball players have to be taken care of throughout their careers and, basically, until they die. I can see that if a person suffers a debilitating injury on a job due to the employers neglect of safety regulations or some such thing, then that employer has to take responsibility for the damage done. But a baseball player didn’t become an addict or alcoholic simply by virtue of becoming a baseball player or through some neglect of MLB.

But, that’s another story. The point is – addiction isn’t a disease the person is born with that doesn’t manifest until they take their first drink or get high for the first time and, then, never goes away. There is a reason, or reasons, for the addiction, and once those reasons have been dealt with in a good drug rehab program, the addiction is gone.

If it is not, then the reasons for the addiction have not been dealt with. That’s it in a nutshell.

I hate to think of people living with the idea that they can’t change, that they can never really get better.

Don’t buy it.

If drug rehab doesn’t work on someone, they didn’t do the right program.

A new study found that just one drink a day, of any kind of alcohol, can increase a woman’s risk of pancreatic cancer by 13%. Imagine what drinking more than that could do. Pancreatic cancer, by the way, is one of the worst. By the time someone goes to the doctor with symptoms it’s usually very advanced. Only one in five or six cases is operable. So the prognosis is not good.

The study also says it’s harder for women to quit drinking than men. I don’t know why that is, but they can get help through alcohol rehab – and may well need it even if the amount they drink is considered just ‘social’.  The criteria is not how much they drink, but whether or not they can stop.

Alcohol rehab addresses all the issues behind not being able to quit. Physically, quitting drinking probably wouldn’t be much of a problem if you’re only drinking one drink a day. But emotional dependence on that one drink is another story.

A good alcohol rehab program would get down to the bottom of that dependence.

You might know someone in this position. If so, you can find out more about it and get recommendations from a professional through us – Drug Rehab Referral. And make sure the women in your life know about this.

We hear about issues stemming from substance abuse frequently in the US. From drunk driving and drug-related traffic stops to prescription and illegal drug abuse. These problems affect every state in this country and all walks of life.

I came across an interesting read recently, which was about a study done by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services on how substance abuse is affecting the workplace. A lot of people equate substance abuse with lower economic areas, homelessness, you name it. But, that’s actually not the majority. Did you know that 77% of illegal drug users are employed full or part-time here in the US?

That means that more than three quarters of the illegal drug using population are mixed in with the working population. What’s more is that substance abuse costs American businesses upwards of 81 billion dollars a year in lost production, work absences as well as accidents. Speaking of absences, about 500 million workdays per year are lost due to substance abuse by employees.

This is a no win situation for either side of the coin. Both the employee and the employer suffer as a result of substance abuse. Employers experience productivity downtrends, suffer because of absenteeism, accident claims and quite possibly the difficulties of dealing with employees who are under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Then there are the issues that come into play for an addict, i.e. their health, relationships with family and friends, job loss and income reduction and possibly overdose and/or death.

Have you ever known of or worked with someone who was under the influence of an illegal drug or alcohol on while on the job? Apparently, according to the study, more than 60% of adults do currently or have in the past. Why is the statistic for substance abuse in the workplace so high then? Are the abusers not being reported? Probably not. The reasons for this could be fear of retribution by the addict, not wanting to get their co-worker in trouble or that they don’t want to get involved.

Substance abuse is an epidemic in our country. Not just by the homeless man on the corner asking for money to buy who-knows-what, but possibly by your coworker. If we are ever going to get a handle on this debilitating, expensive, pervasive crisis, we’re going to have to actually speak up and do something about it. Get those people into drug rehab or alcohol treatment. Each one of us can do our part to get them addiction help!

I came across a headline today that I thought must have been a joke. When I read further into the article, I realized that it’s not, and am absolutely shocked! Russia is experiencing a heatwave and vodka-swigging, drunken people are trying to swim to cool off, and drowning.

I actually was in such disbelief that I Googled the story to find out if anyone else had written about the terrible events that have taken place. Sure enough, there were several other articles written, that I was able to easily find online. The death toll so far has surpassed 1200 people since June. And, in one day, there were 49 drowning deaths in Russia from drunken swimming.

The most heartbreaking part of this news story was to find out that children are also drowning because their parents are too drunk to notice them. If you can believe this, last week there were five children who drowned at camp because their counselors were too drunk to pay attention!

A lot of people like to take some drinks with them to the beach. It’s certainly quite common in many parts of the world. But this has proven that it can be quite dangerous, if people are being reckless and irresponsible with the amounts that they’re consuming. This would fall into the category of binge drinking, basically drinking large amounts of alcohol quickly to get drunk. Swigging massive quantities of vodka before taking a swim is not the best idea and you’d think that people would have caught onto this by now!

A state of emergency has been declared in Russia because of the death toll. Unfortunately, this is a long standing issue there, alcohol abuse needs addiction treatment. It’s time to really take a look at this crisis and help Russians with their blatantly obvious problems with alcohol addiction. Alcohol rehab programs are desperately needed and fast! It may be a good idea to restrict alcohol from the public beaches too. I’m sure it would help save many lives.

Now that the summer is upon us, it’s time for parties and vacations. Often times, at the bbq or family reunion, there will be alcoholic beverages present. And frequently there will be that family member who drinks a few too many of those beverages. Or, perhaps you are the one who’s tipping the bottle a bit too much and maybe your kids are around, hearing you slur your words and get pretty silly.

When it comes to alcohol, and drugs for that matter, children are experimenting with these substances at alarmingly young ages. In a recent study that looked at adolescent drug and alcohol use, there were some interesting correlations between substance abuse and family upbringing.

The study showed that kids who have ‘indulgent’ parents were much more likely to drink heavily. Not shocking… But, what was interesting was that parents who aren’t openly heavy drinkers, but aren’t warm and involved in their kids’ lives, or are strict and a bit cold, also still had higher chances of getting involved in the drinking scene.

The best scenario in a family unit, are parents who are warm, involved in their children’s lives and openly communicative as well as not being big on drinking.

So, as the summer progresses, and the plans for partying with the family are made, let’s all keep this in mind. Let’s lead by example and be warm and loving parents to our kids. It will make a big difference in the long run for the health and well being of our children. And, perhaps help to avoid alcohol addiction treatment in their futures!

Once again, Lindsay Lohan has made the news. Today, it was reported that she missed a court date by arriving ninety minutes late. Then apparently, she was seen out shopping. Does she not think that the law applies to her? Does she not think there is a problem here? It would appear the answer to both of those questions is no, she doesn’t.

Lindsay was supposed to appear in court because of a lawsuit that was filed against her 2008, by three men, for endangering their lives. She was reported to have held them hostage in her vehicle while driving drunk. She probably thought it was fun at the time, but it obviously wasn’t good times for her passengers.

Stories have been surfacing for years about Lindsay, going in an out of treatment centers, having quarrels with her father for being too loose lipped with the press, having drunk driving episodes, photos of her so drunk she can barely stand up, having prescription drug addiction problems, etc. She’s got some issues, and I don’t think anyone could argue that point. It’s also quite apparent that the steps that she’s gone through over that period of time have not helped her.

When a young person is getting in trouble with the law for alcohol and prescription drug abuse, there’s a problem that really needs to be properly addressed. She needs help. Drug and alcohol rehab help, to be exact.

I would venture to guess that she doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with her actions or behavior. One of these days, it will catch up with her though, and when it does, I hope for her sake that she decides to go to a treatment center on her own volition to conquer the addictions that she is battling. If not, she’ll wind up in prison, or worse, dead. She’s a very bright and beautiful, young star, it is my hope that she realizes this and gets the help she so desperately needs.